In recent years medical imaging technology, examples of which include, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) scanning, has been employed to construct patient-specific data bases, from which geometrical three-dimensional models, for example, representative of a structure of one or more organs of a body of the patient, may be generated. Such a model of a bodily structure, for a particular patient, can be employed as a reference during an invasive procedure performed on the patient, for diagnostic and/or treatment purposes, for example, to facilitate navigation of a medical instrument and/or device to a target site within the structure of the patient.
It is almost always necessary that the invasive procedure further employ some kind of real time tracking of the medical instrument within the patient. Many tracking methods employ real time imaging of the instrument and the bodily structure, in which the instrument is being advanced, for example, via fluoroscopy, so that a position of the medical instrument within the structure, as the instrument is being advanced therein, may be directly tracked. However, other tracking methods, which employ a signal transmitter and a sensor attached to the medical instrument, for collecting information defining a position of the instrument, for example, according to magnetic field generating and sensing technologies, provide no overall image or representation of the structure in which the instrument is being advanced, and therefore no context for the positional information collected from the sensor to aid in the navigation of the instrument. In these latter cases, patient-specific data defining a geometric model of the bodily structure may be employed to provide a representation of the structure, onto which the positional information of the sensor may be mapped, in order to provide guidance in navigating the medical instrument. Various methods for real time mapping of this type of positional information onto a representation of a bodily structure, generated from patient-specific data, have been disclosed, but there is still a need for new systems and methods that provide for simpler and less time consuming approaches.